![]() ![]() Such is a story-an account-of the constitution of the cosmos. Next cameīroad-breasted Gaia, the secure dwelling place forever of all… 3 Hence our notion of philosophy as a first explanation of the world is at least historically inaccurate, which is more germanely ascribed to mythology (muthos), meaning simply story, such as one finds in Hesiod’s Theogony, genesis of the Gods:įirst of all Chaos came into being. 2 Rather, it appears that only after a tradition of ideas and culture had fermented, was philosophy to be engendered. In Greece, the literary tradition of Homer and Hesiod was well established prior to the emergence of the legendary first philosopher Thales in 6 BCE, and the poetic tradition likely remained the dominant system of thought during the time of the philosophers. Philosophy was not the earliest of intellectual endeavors, not even the earliest system. To issue an identification of the beginning of philosophy, we contemplate what we mean by philosophy and what it was historically-this is search for a definition. Yet, as a young student, if ever I hope for understanding’s unity, it is in the name philosophy.Īn interesting inquiry of philosophy’s nature, in a sense the earliest, is our identification of the origin of Greek philosophy with the thinkers before Socrates, the Presocratics. ![]() I understand that my sources and the central ideas that form my subject are solely from Western philosophy, and the applicability of my remarks should, strictly, be to these. 1 And deduction, I think, constitutes a philosophical criterion for all sciences and understanding, on which we may seek a definition of philosophy. I suggest a view of the history of philosophy as a maturation of a method of reasoning that can be generally called deduction. In this essay, I begin with the first recognized Western philosophers known as the Presocratics, philosophers before Socrates, and proceed to concepts of philosophy developed by Plato and Aristotle. If being is after all a plurality-if the unity of philosophy cannot be found in its subject-can we identify it in the philosopher, in a unity of thought? The ancient Greeks sought unity in nature. Yet the question is upon us, and we must address it by our present thoughts. This question, I realize, is certainly beyond me, a college student who has not completed a first reading of philosophy’s history, of East or West. Perhaps a disputation of terminology is only significant when it is a dialogue of the associated meanings, and my question, for a definition of philosophy, is whether there is not a common idea that underlies different subject areas and may act, not as a functional, but a constitutional definition of philosophy. This is our efficient disciplinarization-is it a truer conception of philosophy? Its proper purview for the present and futurity is the specialized disciplines of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. For some of us, philosophy is a moribund enterprise having exhausted its efficacy. Yet to us students of modernity, heirs of twenty-three centuries of this enterprise’s history, hopeless it seems to maintain one body of knowledge through one method of thought. To thoroughly study each part of Being, we designated the disciplines of natural philosophy, moral (human) philosophy, and critical (thinking) philosophy. It approaches us, an ancient recollection-of what is, of what is not, of principles and elements, of nature, of virtue, of goodness, of the soul, of existence’s intelligibility, of knowledge, of logic, of metaphysics, of the limit of understanding, of unity. Is it not, for the student, the first and final question- what is philosophy? To some, it is a name for all prodigious attainments of human thought. ![]() ![]() My thought, my philosophy-my philosophy, my thought. ![]()
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